I am indebted to Josh Cohen who inspired this conversation.
From time to time I come across transcripts of
Werner's
recorded media. In some cases, transcripts of his recorded media
provide a clearer rendering of
his speaking
than even the recorded media itself, due largely and in part to
conversion issues when the recorded media has been converted from tape
to a digital format.
Here's a novel deployment of these transcripts, especially when
the source
recorded media is also available, regardless of its quality: while
listening to the recorded media, read along from the transcript of the
recorded media. It generates
a powerful experience
for the reader of who they are with who
Werner
is being.
As I come across more transcripts of
Werner's
recorded media, I'll post them to this collection.
Here are the links to the
Werner Erhard
transcripts:
Transcribed and lightly cleaned for readability from a 1970s lecture,
likely delivered in the context of structural integration / Rolfing.
Obvious transcription errors corrected; original sense and phrasing
preserved as closely as possible. Audience interjections noted where
clear.
Introduction
And I'm not going to take long, except to just remind you, as I met
Werner tonight, I said it is not possible for him to look like this, to
be this age, and to have done all of these things that I did. That's an
impossibility. But just to say to you that if this course were opened
up now on an individual basis, this man would fill three auditoriums
like this just by hearsay.
He established the famous est Educational Organization,
which really is not very old - I understand in 1971. And there have
been 26,000 people who have all walked some life since that period of
time who have been trained through this educational organization
located in five places in this country, headquarters in San Francisco,
an office here in Los Angeles. And their purpose is to open additional
dimensions for life experiences. And this, in short, is like raising
levels of awareness, expanding consciousness. And that's an awful lot
of people who have been trained. In addition to this, he studied,
experienced, and practiced - and I think those three things. A lot of
us study, we've got practices, but we're doing experiences - the
Eastern and Western philosophies, including Zen, the martial arts of
Aikido and Tai Chi. I understand he's worked in Scientology, Gestalt
Therapy. And the master, Ida Rolf, has had her hands on him too. We
share those things in common.
In addition to this, I was told that he's held over 36,000 individual
hours of concentration. And that's an awful lot of hours. He's been
associated with the outstanding people, or the people who are the most
influential figures in the world today, having to do with conceptual
frontiers of human understanding. He is associated with them, and he
has influenced them. And that is really a relative challenge when it
comes to the exercise.
He's a dynamic and a challenging person. And who could be better to
talk to us tonight about the mind? Our speaker, and it gives me extreme
pleasure to introduce to you, Werner Erhard.
Thank you,
Craig Potts
Werner Erhard is Speaking
I'm glad I don't have to live up to that. It was very kind of Dr. Hunt
to introduce me in that way. Actually, I've heard a great deal about
her from Ida. And since hearing about her from Ida, I've heard about
her from other people. And as I told her when I walked in, her
reputation precedes her by a long way. I also have a reputation, but it
means something different when you say I have a reputation than when
you say that Dr. Hunt has a reputation. And I'm interested whoever
chose me to speak about the mind, because my work is blowing people's
minds, and I don't know why I would be considered as qualified to speak
about the mind. But in blowing some minds, I've discovered a couple of
things that I'd like to share with you. I'd like to share them with you
from a particular point of view. I'd like to share them with you from
the point of view of structural integration, rather than talk about
what I've observed from any other point of view, or even my own point
of view. I'd like to relate it to my experience of structural
integration and what I've understood from what Dr. Walters said and
what she shared with me.
I think that the first thing that's really important when you talk
about the mind is to recognize that you've chosen an impossible task
for yourself, because it's kind of a waste of time to talk to people
about their minds, because the problem is that people listen to
information about their minds with their minds. And so what they do is
to get some more information that they didn't have before, and if you
keep accumulating information, what happens is that you get a lot of
information, and that's all right. What you're out to do is to get a
lot of information, and information can be important and useful, but it
kind of isn't my bag. My bag is to kind of destroy information, and I
think you can see what I mean by that as I go along. At any rate, I
understand that Dr. Bach will be here to speak about the spirit, and
that someone else will speak about man, and Dr. Hunt will speak about
the body. So I just want to, before I begin to speak about the mind,
kind of put it in context.
Ida spoke about the open universe and the closed universe, and for me,
the mind is the closed universe. She spoke about the closed universe
being linear and measured, and she used a very good analogy, for me at
least, and that is that we attempt to understand what's going on by
putting a grid of straight lines over it, and we assign numbers to the
squares in the grid, and we can define what it is we're looking at by a
set of numbers, coordinates in that way, and we say, well, I know about
that then, because I've measured it. That, for me, is what the mind
does. It knows about things. And so you and I have the sense that we
know about things which perhaps we don't know about. We don't know
about them because to know means something more than to put a grid over
them and assign a set of coordinates to them. And that's essentially
what the mind does, as I'll demonstrate, or as I'll explain later on.
The point that I want to underline regarding putting this business
about the mind in context is that it's very clear to me, based on my
own personal experiences, that you and I are not our mind. And
historically that's kind of always gotten interwoven. It was
interesting - I came down with a gentleman and on the way over here he
said that Milton had said that the mind is a place of its own and that
it by itself can make a heaven or hell. And that's the kind of
statement that comes from the notion that either I am my mind or if I'm
not it's running me. I mean I'm dangling on the end of its string. And
that's kind of been man's viewpoint. And so he's learned about his mind
thinking that he is his mind. And the mind as I see it is a
representation of a person. It isn't the person. It's kind of, as Dr.
Rolf said in her introductory remarks, I guess it was last week, it's
the map and not the territory. And if you think that the map is the
territory you get in very big trouble. Because if you walk across a
piece of paper you don't know what mountains are like. Even though you
walk across a piece of paper that is a map of the mountains, you don't
know what mountains are like.
So I see the mind as a part of the whole. I see whatever it is - I
don't know what to call us, but whatever we are - I see us as the open
universe and the mind as a part of that or the closed universe. And the
damage that I see that gets done is that people attempt to function in
this closed universe and define the open universe. And the problem with
defining the open universe from inside the closed universe is that you
deal with it conceptually only. You don't deal with it directly. You
make models of it, because modeling is the way you deal with things
which are bigger than you. And so, what I'd like to do now is to get
off that, talk about my notion about what the mind is, and then perhaps
come back and see how it fits into the whole of whatever it is that you
and I are. I have a really very mundane and practical notion about
almost everything. I didn't plan it that way, it's just the limits of
my capacity, I guess. And my notions about the mind are very mundane
and very practical. Fundamentally, I see that what the mind is, is a
set of records. And so, what the mind is, is records. Now, records take
many forms. You have a phonograph record that has the music or voice on
it, or you can have a file holder with a bunch of information in it, or
you can have a videotape, or you can have a novel. The list is almost
endless. There are lots of different kinds of records, and what the
mind is, is records. And the mind is a record of particular things, of
a particular thing. And what the mind is, is a record of now. So, if
you will, let me represent now by this point. And if we can define this
point as an instant of now, experience, or, let's make it simple, just
an instant of now. And if we can use this line over here to be the edge
of something that might look like that, for instance, like a
photograph, then this would be the record of that.
Now, it's a kind of interesting thing. I will tell you first off, right
off the bat, that almost immediately, if I ask you to tell me what's
happening right now, you will tell me what's happening here. For
instance, if I ask you to tell me what's happening to you right now,
just tell me anything that's happening to you right now.
[Audience member "Joe"]: My ear is itching.
Good. Now, Joe said, "My ear is itching." And what he was describing is
what happened to him a moment ago. He didn't describe what was
happening to him now. As a matter of fact, if you attempt to describe
what's happening to you now, you find out you can't do it. Because as
soon as you open your mouth, you're talking about the past. In other
words, you are no longer talking about the instant of now, you're
talking about the record of the instant of now. Consequently, I'd like
that to kind of illustrate to you and make clear to you that human
beings, for the most part, have got to be stuck in their minds. Because
we sure flap our yaps a lot. And when I'm flapping my yap, I'm stuck in
my mind. For sure. So at any rate, what the mind is, is not an instant
of now, but a record of an instant of now. And it's a particular kind
of record, it's a multi-sensory record. And I mean multi-sensory in a
broader way than the way in which you think I mean. I do mean the
traditional five senses, and the kinesthetic sense, and all those other
breakdowns of physical senses that Dr. Hunt will, I'm sure, tell you
about ...
When I say multi-sensory, I mean something beyond the traditional
notion of senses. I, for instance, mean that that moment, that that
record of right now, includes in it every sensation in your body. Even
those sensations which were peripheral to your consciousness. All the
sensations of your body are recorded in that record of that moment of
now. In addition to which, your feelings are recorded in there, a
record of how you felt.
[To audience member "Lloyd"]: If I ask Lloyd how he feels, he can tell
me.
Well, he isn't actually telling me how he feels, is he? He's telling me
how he felt a moment ago. And he's able to tell me how he felt a moment
ago, because the record includes his feelings. See, he feels now, and
makes a record of the feeling, and then he can describe the record. I
mean, if he asked me, for instance, "Werner, what's your attitude?" I
could tell Lloyd my attitude, because in this multi-sensory record is a
record of attitude. And in that multi-sensory record is a record of all
which is. Okay? If it is, it's in there. Now, in the normal course of
events, this talk takes me about eight hours, and I'm going to do it in
an hour, so when I get to the hard parts, I'm going to gloss over them.
The hard part is that I mean multi-sensory in an even bigger way than
I've said so far. For instance, I mean that Lloyd's record of right now
includes not only his emotional state, but a record of my emotional
state. It isn't commonly accepted that you and I have the ability to
perceive emotions directly. We would say Lloyd could figure out
Werner's emotional state by clues. I'm saying something more than that.
I'm saying that this record of right now includes a direct perception
of my emotional state. I'm saying that you and I have the ability to
sense each other's emotional state, and to do it directly. And that
the mind will make a record of that perception.
The record is so multi-sensory that it's even more multi-sensory than
that. But that's enough for tonight. When I do the eight-hour version,
I'll tell you the rest of it. So, what the mind is then, is a
multi-sensory record of a moment of now. I want to expand the
definition. The mind is a multi-sensory record of a moment of now, and
it's also a total multi-sensory record of a moment of now. In other
words, it includes all those things which you were aware of now, all of
those things which you were not aware of now. For instance, in my
periphery is Don, and there he is. He's full-blown over there. And
while I'm paying attention to him. While I'm paying attention to Jim, I
don't see Don, but I do see Don. And we all know that the literature
supports the fact that the records held in the brain. that the records
are really kind of total, and that they are so total that they contain
the minutest details. In other words, in brain surgery, when people's
brain cells are probed, people don't remember. They relive. In order to
relive an experience, that experience has to be recorded in incredible
detail. So when I tell you that the record is multi-sensory in total,
it isn't really very difficult to take a look at some of the evidence
we have. Now, I mean actually more total than you think I mean, but we
won't get into that either. Tonight, we just won't get into that. We're
going to stay conservative here and talk about every normal kind of
total. So the point is that the record includes a hell of a lot more
than you thought it did, than we normally think it does. You and I know
each other, don't we, Phil? Thank you. I remember, Phil, when I looked
at him. you and I have shared some experiences together. And one of the
things that wasn't there for you was his name, but his name is in that
record. So there's a whole lot of other information. Now, I act with
him as if I am limited in my interaction with him to the material
that's available to me. I pretend that's so.
Those of us who have studied a little psychology or a little psychiatry
know that the material which isn't available to me is perhaps playing a
greater role than I'm normally aware of. But I only remember that every
once in a while. In the normal course of events, I act like, well, it's
just what comes up for me. It's just that part that I can remember.
OK, so at any rate, what the mind is is a multi-sensory total record of
a moment of now. Now, the mind. and this, if it has any importance,
will have to come up later. the mind stacks these records linearly, one
after the other, like so. So that the mind, then, is a linear
arrangement of multi-sensory total records of successive moments of
now. There are successive moments of now, and these are records. And so
that's the first and most fundamental notion, or first and most
fundamental observation I've made about my mind, and about your mind,
is that what the mind is is a linear arrangement of multi-sensory total
records of successive moments of now. And that the totality of the
record includes the metabolism of every cell in that moment, the
function of the endocrine system, the degree of contraction in any
muscle cell, and the state of each cell in the body. So the record is
really total, total. or very multi-sensory.
That's not very popular to say that, by the way, because it's not
wonderful, you know, it isn't terrific, it isn't poetic, it isn't wild.
it stinks. And it's too bad, it's the way I have it, you know. So there
it is, that's what the mind is: it's a linear arrangement of
multi-sensory, total records of successive moments of now. Then the
next question. that's what the mind is, too. See, had you asked me,
"Werner, what is the mind?" that's what I would have told you. Now I'd
be finished answering that question, and then you might ask me another
question, and you might say, "What is the purpose of the mind?" In
other words, why have those records? And then I have an answer to that,
which I'm going to lay on you next The purpose of the records is very
simple. A lot of people think that the purpose of their mind is beauty,
people think that the purpose of their mind is aliveness, people think
that the purpose of their mind is discovery, people think that the
purpose of their mind is love. people have thought that the purpose of
their mind is an incredible array of things, all of which bring us to a
state in which we can't explain our behavior, or if we can explain it,
we can't explain it in a way that we can do anything about it.
See, I have a little problem with most of what I know. About 99.9% of
what I know, we all know. And I have a problem with it. My problem
with it is that it hasn't produced anything of any value humanly. It's
produced caves for people to live in with square walls, which are
obviously much better than round walls. And also it's produced a level
of sanitation which now allows us to go to the bathroom in our own
homes. Because you know, back when they didn't have good sanitation,
you had to go outside. So whatever I know has produced a degree of
material well-being which is incredible. I mean, it's so good that you
can go to the bathroom in your own house. Normally not too far away
from the kitchen because of the way plumbing is. The point is that the
quality of our lives is perhaps not any different than the quality of
people's lives 10 years ago. Now, in the last 10 years, an incredible
number of things have been discovered. The quality of my life hasn't
changed at all in 10 years. And if I go back 1,000 years, it's just
about the same as it was 1,000 years ago. There are a certain number of
people who are all right, and a certain percentage of people who are
not all right, and a certain percentage of people in the middle. And
the same kind of problems that people had in families 1,000 years ago,
they have today. And I have not seen that the quality of life has
changed at all.
We've gotten very arrogant about our ability to communicate. I can
remember when I was a youngster, people said, "Boy, television. now
we're having an informed electorate, and people will be able to elect
really superior government people." And you know how that's worked out.
You see, it may not be that this plethora of words is communication. In
other words, communication may be something that happens in a very
different place than the place in which you've always thought it
happened. We think that if we say more, we'll have more. But there's no
evidence for that. There's no evidence that the quality of our lives is
any better than the quality of people's lives 10 years ago, or 1,000
years ago, or 2,000 years ago. There's not much evidence. So the
notions about the purpose of the mind seem to me to be inadequate in
that they don't work. Now that's incredibly arrogant. It's too big.
It's the way I see it. And if it's arrogant, then I will be arrogant.
My observation of the purpose of the mind is that the mind has a single
purpose, and it has no other purpose but that single purpose. And the
single purpose of the mind is survival. By the way, I have no respect
for people who can only spell a word one way. I'd like to tell you that
I chose that word specifically and particularly because it's the only
word which I consider to be accurate. So that means that if it reminds
you of another word, I don't mean that. I mean that word, and I don't
mean any other word. I mean that word and that word alone. And I mean
the sense that that word evokes, and I mean the particular definition
which that word evokes. And I'd like to tell you that, as I observe it,
the mind has no purpose other than survival. It doesn't have a third
purpose, or a 49th purpose. Its first, second, third, and all purposes
are survival. And the purpose of the mind is the survival of the being.
The mind's purpose is the survival of the being. Now, I haven't
defined the being, and I'm not going to define the being, because
that's going to be handled in another night. I'll let Dr. Bach do that
one. At any rate, the purpose of the mind is the survival of the being,
and here's the hook: or anything the being considers itself to be.
So, let this shape represent a mind. I'll put an M in there so you
won't forget. Let this shape represent a being. I'll put a B in there
so that you won't forget. And let this shape represent a thing. And
I'll put a T in there so you won't forget. The purpose of the mind is
the survival of the being, or anything the being considers itself to
be. So, if this being considered itself to be this thing, the purpose
of this mind would be the survival of this thing. I'll say it one more
time. The purpose of the mind is the survival of the being, or anything
the being considers itself to be. Now, I haven't told you how the mind
works yet, or what it does to bring about this purpose, just what it is
and what its purpose is. Now, I'd like to tell you something which I
consider to be one of the most important things I know. Now, I only
know three important things, so you're going to get one-third of all of
it tonight. In fact, I'll tell you two-thirds of it. The first thing I
know is that nothing is important. That's one-third of what I know. The
second third of what I know is what an ego is. And I'm really pleased
at having discovered what an ego is, because it suddenly illuminated
all of the things that I studied from the Eastern philosophies and
Eastern disciplines.
And it made a hell of a lot of sense out of the Western psychological
and psychiatric notions and a lot of the philosophical notions. Because
a lot of what people say about ego is very accurate. But nobody ever
says what it is. So I'd like to tell you exactly what it is. I
immediately got the thing to go over and defend the chair because
that's the way I'm set up. See, I said the purpose of the mind.
Actually, I should have said the design function, because machines
don't have purposes. They have design functions, and the mind is
literally a machine. And its design function or purpose is the survival
of the being. or anything the being says it is. So if the being says
it's this chair, then the mind starts to protect the chair. Now a very
strange thing happens. When the being says, "I am my own mind," it has
become a particular thing at that point - you have an ego. Ego is the
function of the mind when it's attempting to protect itself. So ego is
actual function. It is the function of the mind, which I haven't
discussed yet. Ego is the functioning of a mind when the being has
considered itself to be its own mind. If you don't mind, I'm going to
use another word for mind, and that other word for mind is "point of
view." Because it could be said that the mind's a point of view about
everything since it's a total record. The only thing which makes it
individual is that I have a point of view. Dr. Hunt and I turned around
and mostly [saw] exactly the same thing, but I'll see it from a
slightly different point of view than she will. And so even though our
records may be the same as they must be if they're total, when we look
from our own point of view, they become different. They become
personal. They become self-ish, you say.
And so ego could be said to be the functioning of one's point of view
when one's point of view is attempting to cause its own survival
because one has considered oneself to be one's own point of view. See,
if you and I consider ourselves to be our mind or our point of view, we
lose our beingness. Our mind stops functioning to promote beingness and
begins to function to promote point of view or itself. Now what would
represent survival for a stack of records? If you discover the answer
to that question, you'll see why human beings behave as they do. What
would represent survival for a stack of records? Well, one of the
things that would represent survival for a stack of records would be
repetition. You have a record, you repeat that record many, many, many,
many, many times.
The more you repeat it, the more survival value it has. The other thing
that represents survival for a record is agreement. The thing which
represents a threat to survival is any disagreement. And so ego is the
function of a mind when it is attempting to produce repetition and
agreement and to avoid disagreement. That can be said in very nasty
terms when you put it down to earth, but this is a class in university
and so I'm gonna state it. [extension class discussion]. You see, what
it turns out, if you study this, if you observe it, you see that the
mind ultimately, its purpose becomes to make you right and everybody
else wrong. Oh, in very subtle ways. By the way, as we mature, as we
grow, as we get wiser, we have very subtle ways of making each other
wrong. See, I now make you wrong by not making you wrong. That's
one-up. See? Because I found out that's hipper than making you wrong
direct on. As Dr. Hunt said, we've had the privilege of training lots
of people and a lot of the people we train are people who are on what I
call the path, what I call the true seeker. The true seeker is that
individual attempting to dominate life or to avoid the domination of
life. He or she is looking for a way to beat the game - surely a mind
function. It's like the game saying: you can't get out if you try.
Attempt to beat the game is the game itself.
The point that I'm attempting to make is that when you reduce this down
to everyday terms, it comes out that the purpose of the mind is to make
the self right and others wrong, to dominate everything and everybody,
to avoid domination by anything or anybody, to self-justify and
invalidate others. Sum it all up by calling it self-righteousness. It
used to be holier-than-thou, it has now become hipper-than-thou. Same
stuff, but the crap for sure. I mean, I don't like to admit it because
I like to think of myself as hip, but there it is. Well, it often
bothers people who say, "What about love?" Well, let me tell you that
if you observe love very carefully, you find out that the only time you
love anybody is when your survival is promoted. And you have to be very
careful about the survival business because what looks antithetical to
survival is often incredibly important to survival. You see, my point
of view is that I'm no good, I've gotta get you to beat up on me
because if you don't beat up on me, my survival is threatened. So I
will be bad enough to get you to beat up on me somehow. So you must see
that people win by losing.
See, a person goes to a therapist in order to get better, except don't
you tell any therapist that because they know better. A person goes to
a therapist in order to have their point of view validated, and most
people come out of therapy with their point of view validated. If you
go as a loser to a therapist whose purpose in life is to make you a
winner, it's driving your survival. I mean, you are a loser. That's who
you are because you have become your point of view. You've given up
your being as you've taken on the role of your mind. Remember when I
started, I said it's impossible to talk about this because I haven't
spoken to your mind. Well, there it is, you see? But I'm down here in
your ear. The next thing I'd like to look at is the way in which the
mind works. If you were a designer and you were given the task of
designing a machine which would promote the survival of its operator -
because after all that's the way it was designed in the first place; it
wasn't until later that it began to promote the survival of the rider.
So you and I fell off our minds a long time ago, a mind just going on
without us. Not doing badly either. At any rate, we are not doing too
well though. If you were charged with responsibility for designing a
machine which was designed to promote the survival of the operator of
that machine and you had merely records of the past to work with, which
of those records would be important to your job? I'm gonna answer
quickly. those records which contain a threat to survival successfully
met are the records which are important to doing the job of surviving.
Because if I know how to handle a threat to my survival, if I know how
to behave when my survival is threatened, then I'll know how to
survive. The records which have no threat to survival in them are
therefore irrelevant, unnecessary. We don't need those. They are of no
value - no survival value, that is. We have to know what to do when our
survival is threatened.
And so they are the records, and the mind, the way it's designed,
breaks them, categorizes them into three categories. And the first and
most important category is a record which contains pain. That's the
shortened version. There's three other things in the record that have
to be there for the mind to work, but I'm gonna relate this to
structural integration, so I'll leave it at that. That's the most
important part of it. The other things, by the way, are it's pain or
impact. Originally, it's always impact, threat to survival and some
degree of unconsciousness, but just that's the pain there for the
moment. So instead of the mind being one stack of records, it's kind of
two stacks of records. On this side are the necessary-to-survival, and
that's those records which have a record of a threat to survival
successfully met. And on this side, you have the not-necessaries.
That's for your non-threat to survival. So you go along for a while
with no threatening material recorded and then you have a pain.
Something happens which induces pain and that record is over here, then
the mind goes back to recording over there. The second kind of record
which is considered to be necessary to do this job of causing survival
is a record containing shock - and now I'm not talking about physical
shock - and some bad feeling. Now this is very technical, to say "some
bad feeling," but you know what I mean.
We could say an unwanted emotion if that's more technical for you. The
third is unwitting reminder of an earlier number one or number two. If
I'm unwittingly reminded of an earlier number one or number two, I will
have that experience, that unwitting reminder will be reported over
here in the necessary-to-survival column. The experience we have called
an upset. Anytime a person is upset, they're operating off of the
recording of an earlier number one or number two - an ache, pain, an
annoyance, nervousness, worry, like that. That also would be up here.
Now these records, these discrete records are wired together in
circuits. It's all very complicated and it takes at least twenty
minutes to explain. Suffice it to say that the necessary survival
records are wired together in circuits. The mind contains at least
thousands and more likely millions and very possibly billions and
perhaps trillions of individual circuits. Each circuit contains
hundreds, probably thousands, maybe millions, perhaps billions, and who
knows, trillions of individual elements in the circuit.
So if I were to draw a diagram. Let's make it uncomplex. I'll draw a
simple diagram. There's the two potential stacks, the not-necessary
information goes over here, then let's say that there's a number one
kind of incident, incident containing pain over there, then the stack
goes on and there's another incident here, a number two, one that has
this shock in it, this unwanted emotion. These two are wired together
in a circuit and then they're back to unnecessary to survival. Then
there's another number one and that becomes a new circuit. And up here
you have a number two and that's part of the old circuit and then up
here you have a number two and that's part of this new circuit. The
point is that they're interconnected and interwoven. And that's what
the mind does with those records in order to organize them to serve the
purpose.
Now so we've got three facts so far.
1) The mind is a linear arrangement of multi-sensory total records of
successive moments of now.
2) The purpose of the mind is the survival of the being or anything the
being considers itself to be. Ego is the function of the mind when the
being has considered itself to be its own mind. When one thinks one is
one's own point of view, one has become an ego. Ego is thinking you are
your point of view. If I think I'm Werner Erhard, that's ego. And if I
function like I'm Werner Erhard, that's ego. Werner Erhard is a
position in the world, a point of view, a set of records.
3) The records are organized into unnecessary and necessary, and the
three kinds of records considered to be necessary given the design of
the mind are records containing pain, shock and upset. The upset being
actually unwitting reminders of earlier ones and twos, the twos being
shock or loss or shocking loss plus a negative emotion or unwanted
emotion and the one being pain or impact, more technically impact, plus
unconsciousness, plus a threat to survival.
Now all machines have a system of logic on which they're built, so I'd
like to tell you the system of logic on which the mind is built. The
system of logic on which the mind is built is that anything is like
anything else, which is like anything else. In other words, the mind
thinks in identities. This is a woman. My mother was a woman. This
woman is being dealt with as my mother was dealt with in order to
survive. This is a man. I have to deal with it the way I dealt with my
mother in order to survive. Because in the mind, a man is a man is a
man is a man is a man. In the mind, woman is a woman. So if there's a
little black dog wagging his tail in front of me happily, that's the
same thing as that big snarling, nasty monster that bit me when I was
three years old, and so I should feel with the little black dog wagging
his tail like I felt with the snarling, nasty monster. There's some
appropriateness in the mind because the mind operates in identities.
And if I hold a woman in my arms and her hair gets into my face, well,
dogs have hair, and I have the same feelings when I hold a woman in my
arms up close. and somebody thought, "Gonna have this complex," you
see. Well, what I really got is a circuit and a machine which operates
with a logic system which works on identification in which similarities
are secret. Little or no similarity exists.
See, it's possible to come up above identification through association.
That's a higher order of logic. And then there's a much higher order of
logic called discrimination, almost unheard of. I mean, it exists in
concept only. So the logic system of the mind is that it's all the
same. And if you will watch people operate, you will see that for
people, it's all the same. See, people say, "What is X?" And what they
want me to do is tell them what's the same as X because they know it's
gotta be the same as because the mind only works in comparisons. So the
mind is a machine of relativity. The mind is a machine of agreement and
disagreement as all measuring devices are. A measuring device is merely
a system of agreement and disagreement, of comparison. The mind too.
So that's four of them, and here's the fifth one. The fifth one is that
when the circumstances surrounding a person in any given moment are in
any way like the circumstances in any one of these thousands or
billions or trillions of circuits, that circuit is pulled in on the
individual and has command value over the individual. Let me say it
again. When what's going on around me reminds me of something that
happened to me in one of those records - and remember what "reminds"
means. Anything is the same as anything else, which is the same as
anything else. So it doesn't take very much to remind me.
Well, what's going on around me in any way reminds me of any incident
reported on this side, that incident and the other incidents in that
circuit are pulled out and have command value over me. What does that
mean? It means that I will have the same sensations in my body now as I
had then. Whether they're appropriate or not, I will have them because
I have become a puppet to this pattern, to this circuit. I'm
dramatizing, acting out the circuit. So first every sensation in my
body will be consistent with that, with the record. The function of my
body in totality will be consistent with that record including myosis,
including the division of cells, including the metabolism of each
individual cell, including the function of the endocrine system, and
including the degree of tension or excitation in each cell and each
muscle cell. I will behave exactly as I behaved in that pattern. By the
way, this is pure good design because if I'm gonna survive, I damn well
better do it the same way. You see, if a deer walks through the forest
and smells the smell and suddenly feels a searing pain in his shoulders
and launches and he jumps up and runs, the next time he's walking
through the forest and he smells that smell, he can't say, "Did I think
I smelled that smell once? Now what did I do that time?" No. It's much
more survival for the pattern to immediately plug in, jump them up in
the air, and run them away. But the jumping up in the air is no longer
appropriate, is it? As a matter of fact, perhaps you do with the smell
because there isn't any animal in the vicinity. That doesn't make any
difference. The mind does not work like "what is appropriate." The mind
works like any other mechanism. It's a stimulus-reaction mechanism.
And so the individual comes under the control of this pattern. His
feelings, her feelings become the feelings of that pattern. So it
doesn't make any difference whether they're appropriate or not. It's a
little black dog and they're lying and just telling you a damn lie
whether it's appropriate or not for me to feel frightened. I feel
frightened because that dog reactivates my dog pattern. Beautifully, I
will explain it too, because in the pattern is the explanation for the
behavior in the pattern. What comes out of the person's mouth. as a
matter of fact, if you do voice recordings and listen to them, you'll
hear when people are running patterns. Their voice takes on a
mechanical quality. It changes totally. And people who work with people
start to pick those things up after a while. All that changes. It
becomes consistent with the musculature of the pattern because it
worked before. It's got to be done again, exactly. You know, I'll tell
you what, if deer walked around figuring out what to do, there would be
no deer; natural selection would wipe them all out. So the person. is
not feeling. The person only has feelings. The person is no longer
thinking, the person only has thoughts. Most of what you and I call our
thoughts are not. They're merely reruns of stuff which allowed us to
survive in the past.
Remember, it's not too simple for survival. It's merely my identity
which once survived. That is my mind and my identity are synonymous. It
goes down to my behavior, the way I act, the way I hold myself, whether
my one shoulder's up in the air or the other shoulder's up in the air,
whether my body's like this, whether my pelvis is one way or the other,
whether my knees are locked and my feet are out, all the rest of that
stuff. Because my muscles will be consistent and will act out the exact
scenario in that circuit. And the other thing to recognize is that
whatever the rationalization is comes right out of the circuit and the
rationalization will be terrible. but the person will believe it
strongly because, you see, their survival is connected to it. And the
attempt to damage the dramatization of that pattern can cause people to
get very funny. If ever if I had to challenge someone's belief. they
get very tooth and claw at that point, you see. Ida talks about. One of
the things that Ida talked to me about is this business about the body
dramatizing patterns and that structural integration being an
opportunity to release the pattern into spontaneity. You see. The mind
has a kind of order which is totally inhuman. It is therefore a kind of
disorder. It's the height of entropy. It wants everything to stop.
Don't move. See, it wants safety. It can't stand to free-flow. It can't
stand to be. It can't stand to meet you. it's got to know everything
about this person so I know how to behave with her. I know exactly how
to act with women. An act. the way I've always acted with women, I have
what I call a man act. And whenever I see a woman, it gets reactivated,
and I do it. And the more successful it is, the more likely I am to
continue to repeat it. The parts that are a little unsuccessful, I will
build justifications around. So you can't expect much from a guy who
grew up as an only child for thirteen years. That's why I'm bad with
women or whatever.
The thing is incredible. It's insidious. It's unbelievable. I mean,
it's unbelievable. It's just incredible. And when you go to attack it,
you're attacking it with itself, and it screws you every time. It never
fails. It's just beautiful. It leads you down a primrose path, gets
you far enough down, and slaughters you. And there you are having
justified yourself all over again, having dominated or avoided
domination. It's just incredible. It's wild. So at any rate, Ida was
discussing with me. her notion that what she was doing was releasing
the patterns that the body had stored, which patterns were there to
protect the body. See, if I come up and slam Dr. Hunt on the shoulder,
she, for the rest of her life, should be ready. I mean, that makes good
sense if you're a machine, but only if you're a machine. If you're a
being, if you're something beyond a machine, it would make a hell of a
lot more sense to just be there because then when the motion comes to
you, you'll be able to deal with that motion. When the threat intrudes,
you'll be able to deal with that intrusion. You won't be anticipating.
You won't be acting from a former situation. I'm very clear about my
own personal experience of Rolfing. My own personal experience of
Rolfing has given the Rolfer the space to be the way I am. The Rolfer
didn't put me back together again. The Rolfer didn't make me the way I
never was. The Rolfer gave. I know Ida says it a little differently.
She says to put you in the field of gravity so that you are. so that it
supports each other.
Yes. I call that being appropriate. You know, it's like being the way
it is. The Chinese had a word for it a long time ago, they called it
the Dao but you're not supposed to talk about that in scientific
circles. So we have to find other words like gravity and those things.
What I've discovered in my own experience is that as the Rolfer
releases my body into spontaneity, the rest of the circuit - because
the circuit has an emotional content, has a mental content, it has a
thinking content, an exact pattern of thinking which we would call
logic. It has behavior - all of those things are also released. Now
they're not immediately released. They are given the space. They'll be
given the space to discharge those other patterns. It makes very real
for me Dr. Rolf's notion that people have time between sessions and
that when they're done they will have time because in fact when one
part. when the integrity of the pattern has been disturbed, when the
integrity of the pattern has been destroyed, the pattern itself will
destroy itself. It will shake itself out, you know, and the emotion
will be discharged. It may not be discharged from the table. It may
just be discharged months later, maybe years later. The behavior may
not be discharged immediately but it has the ability to be discharged.
You see the one problem with operating out of a pattern is that every
time you operate out of it, you reinforce it. The only thing which
makes the operation of a pattern self-destructive to the pattern is to
disturb the integrity of the pattern. So if the Rolfer disturbs the
integrity of the pattern, then the Rolfer has made the pattern
self-destructive. And every time the pattern is run, it tends to
disrupt itself. Yeah, let's just do that. Let's talk about it. Let's
have some questions.
Questions and Answers
Selected and cleaned; many audience questions and Werner's responses
follow the same themes of patterns, pain, experience vs record, time,
survival, and the limits of the mind.
On instinctual survival vs higher behavior (eg self-sacrifice):
No, this is physical survival, and remember that the identity is often
not physical. A lot of the time, people are not identifying themselves
with their bodies. Mostly you and I are identifying ourselves as a set
of principles. And you will die for your principles, literally. All the
behavior is merely harmonics of instinctual behavior.
On experience and description:
Anything that is "here" is non-experiencing. Only "here" [in pure
presence] is experiencing. Experience itself cannot be described. It
happens out of time and words happen in time. Experience is timeless,
has nothing to do with the mind.
On "getting better" and patterns:
First off, it's my own personal view that "getting better" is spent
because it invalidates where you are. And that being where you are
seems to work. So I don't ever try to make people better. I consider
people to be perfect the way they are. There is no such thing as a
negative pattern or a positive pattern. All patterns are mechanical and
therefore anti-being. There are no good patterns. Spontaneity, as
compared to mechanicalness.
On pain and Rolfing:
Pain equals resistance. Experience does not happen in time, therefore
there is no persistence in experience, there's only persistence in
non-experience. For two hours you did not experience the pain at all.
That for two hours you resisted the experience of pain and did not
experience the pain. That what you and I call pain is not pain. That
is, what you and I call pain is not an experience. It is a rerun of a
record of an experience.
On time:
The present does not exist between the past and the future. The present
exists out of time. No one has ever experienced time. It cannot be
experienced. It's unexperiencable. It's an illusion. And so. the
linearity of the arrangement of the records which creates the illusion
of time.
Werner's closing remarks (excerpt)
I wanted to take a minute before you go to thank you very much for
being with me. I have a remarkable life. If you knew how ordinary I am,
you would have a remarkable life. 25,000 people have allowed you to
participate in their lives. That's the ultimate gift. I'd like to
acknowledge you for the space that you've created for me and
particularly for allowing me to participate to some degree in your
life. Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed being here.